A router is a main node apparatus of the Internet, and a main function of the router is determining, by way of routing, forwarding of data. With the development of the computer hardware technologies, development directions of the architecture of the router are large capacity as well as distribution. At present, processing performance or a capacity of the router is still an important goal pursued by the development of a service bandwidth. At the same time, to satisfy a demand of a large bandwidth, stability and reliability are also indispensable indexes.
Referring to FIG. 1, FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a data forwarding structure of a router in the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, forwarding engines (FEs, Forwarding Engines) are bound to physical interface cards (PICs, Physical Interface Cards) one-to-one, each FE may not only perform uplink data sending, but also perform downlink data sending, and interconnections between the FEs are achieved via a switching network. In the forwarding structure shown in FIG. 1, uplink data may be inputted via any PIC of a system, sent by an FE bound to the PIC in uplink direction, and then sent to any FE in the system via the switching network, and finally a PIC bound to the FE outputs the inputted data. Therefore, the forwarding structure makes full use of forwarding resources and expands a forwarding capacity. Meanwhile, a 1:1 backup is performed on the switching network, thereby achieving reliability of the switching network.
However, during the research, the inventors find that, in the forwarding structure in the prior art, only a 1:1 backup is performed on a switching network and no backup is performed on an FE and a PIC, and the function of data forwarding cannot be implemented normally once the FE or the PIC fails, resulting in low reliability of the whole system.